Yes, for a bit of sideline gossip, the day after publishing The Zombie Adventures of Sarah Bellum last week, I heard from the top worldwide romance publisher. With suggestions for tweaking my submitted example of work (containing no zombies) and using my ‘accessible’ romance writing style, so that I would suit one or the other of their imprints. On a bit of a high from finishing the 135k-word Sarah Bellum Zombie Adventures epic earlier than expected, I was planning on having a few months’ break from blog chapter postings anyway, so the prospect of re-writing a shorter chick-lit of around 55-65k sounds like a way of passing the time. So I’m looking into it and reading their latest releases.

Trouble is, I keep thinking of new stuff I want to parody 🙂

Something that’s inspired me lately, is the trend on Youtube for re-edits of trailers and movie clips, by fans. My brothers and I used to do our own re-dubbed voice-overs for Star Trek when we were kids, on an ancient VHS with a Play/Rec/Dub setting. Must have been the earliest invented!

I don’t just mean ‘re-edits’ as in, a fan’s favourite bits of the movie. I mean where they’ve changed the implied genre, or storyline, as in the political-thrillerised version of ‘Splash’ above. That’s really creative, and the great thing about Youtube is everyone can share and appreciate a different slant on what Hollywood does.

It has been done in books already – most notably with ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’ by P.D. James, and ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Two different interpretations of the same Jane Austen romance. James took the original characters from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ but not the original book or prose, and penned a murder mystery in place of a happy ever after – but her imitation of Austen’s style is spot on, so it is the genre which has changed, but not the voice as such.

Grahame-Smith took the original text – legally, as it is in the ‘public domain’ meaning out of copyright worldwide – copyright expires in most countries at the wonderful-sounding date of ‘death (of the author) + 70 years’ or in a few cases ‘death (author) + 100 years’ – and added butt-kicking martial artist zombie-killer action to it.

If you plan to do similar, as in either of these examples, make sure the original content you are planning on mashing up is in the ‘public domain’ (as defined by the time-spans above). Public domain does NOT mean ‘the characters have been discussed in the Daily Mail’ or that they have fan pages on Facebook, or profiles on Wiki.

Parody as made by National Lampoon, and the Barry Trotter books etc, is a reworking of a genre, or recognisable copyrighted current franchise – but with new characters, which may sound and act similar to the originals, and also importantly, with jokes in. Although ‘parody’ is still not recognised in all countries (some consider it copyright infringement where readily identifiable, and deem them not publishable, as with fan-fiction), many books and films, especially fantasy/humour (including Pratchett’s Discworld series) pay homage to earlier works in ways that the reader or viewer can identify with.

For this to work, the parody element – the tribute, or homage – has to be something that connects broadly with the audience… Hell, I’ve just realised it sounds like I’m on a podium at some really dull masterclass 🙂

That’s the bare bones of it. The part I’m supposed to be discussing today, is the genre twist option. Where, like P.D. James, you take an old tale, and tell it for a different audience. I hear that very kinky things are currently going on in the world of crusty old romances at the minute, never mind murder mysteries and zombies. The difference with kinky stuff, is you knew it was going on anyway – just that the doors were closed on the reader most of the time, and people didn’t floss or shower back then. Mmmm…

Anywho…

Supposing, for example, you took Sherlock Holmes and re-wrote him in the style of Bridget Jones’ Diary? Or Frankenstein in the style of a CSI: Las Vegas police proceedural, analysing all of the body parts going missing? I’d like to see Kathy Reichs do that one… It was done fantastically with Johnny Depp in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ – so it’s not an entirely new concept (just look at the action-style on show in the latest Sherlock-themed TV and movie releases), but potentially a form of almost-unexploited literary mash-up yet to reach the mainstream humour of bookshelves.